It’s sort of like the Bay to Breakers annual civic event, except Run Wild isn’t owned by some hung-up, Burnsian, “Christian Billionaire” what lives in Colorado and uses your B2B entry fee to fight the concept of evolution. (How refreshing.)

Anyway, today’s 5K race was 3053 vs. 1729 leading most of the way through. One of these guys won, you’d think.

Is this Fell? I can’t really tell:

Here’s Oak, anyway:

As you can see, this race swings both ways, with 5K and 10K runners facing each other at times:

Support San Francisco Firefighters Toy Program Bring a new toy or two to donate to Bay Area Children in need Run dressed as a toy in the “Run Wild Like A Child Costume Contest” PRE-POST RACE EXPO

The entire event is staged from the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park, which is the outdoor plaza in the center of:

California Academy of Sciences De Young Museum Japanese Tea Garden Start Check-In is at Music Concourse — see below for Start details.

‘RUN WILD LIKE A CHILD 5K’ COSTUME CONTEST

Run or Walk the 5K dressed as a favorite childhood toy to be eligible for the costume contest judging. Prizes will be awarded to the Top Ten Costumes selected by the Judges. Click to see some past year’s costumes!

After the race join us in the Music Concourse where you can ‘get down’ with live music provided by Pure Ecstasy while enjoying refreshments and the final costume judging on the main stage. Entrants can pick up their T-shirt and goodie bag, as well as visit sponsor booths for free samples and fitness information. The awards ceremony and Costume Parade & Judging will begin at approximately 10:00 AM at the Bandshell.

T-SHIRT PICK-UP

Pre-registered entrants may pick up their T-shirt with the full color logo in the Post-Race Expo area from 7:00 AM to 8:15 AM race morning or immediately following the race. Race Day entrants can pick up their shirt immediately following the race. The T-shirt Booth will be closed from 8:16 AM – 8:45 AM. T-shirt sizes cannot be guaranteed.

SUPPORTING

The San Francisco Firefighter’s Toy Program is the city’s largest and the nation’s oldest program of its kind. Distributing over 200,000 toys to more than 40,000 disadvantaged children. Besides helping individual families in need, the Toy Program serves many community organizations, including shelters for abused women and children, inner-city schools, neighborhood groups, children’s cancer wards, and pediatric AIDS units. SFFF Toy Program also responds on a year round basis to displaced children who become victims of fires, floods and other such disasters. The SFFF Toy Program is dependent solely on donations.

BRING A TOY and/or MAKE A DONATION The San Francisco Firefighter’s Toy Program will be onsite race day accepting donations of new unwrapped toys. Entrants are encouraged to bring a toy or two on race day to donate and/or to make a cash donation when you register. Any donation above your entry fee will be given to the San Francisco Firefighters Toy Program and is a 100% tax deductible.

“Up at Fulton and Scott is a great shambling old Gothic house, a freaking decayed giant, known as The Russian Embassy”

Und der Süden:

The raffle board is a who’s who of local bidnesses:

See you next year!

*Nobody wants your aging boxy CRT TV. My hefty early-1990’s Sony Trinitron is worth maybe ten cents a pound these days but only because it still works flawlessly. When it finally gives up its ghost, it will be worth negative dollars, it will be a liability. Really, it’s unsellable, regardless of whether it works or not.

**I’d seal myhaulin plastic bags and let it all sit for weeks (preferably in the freezer, if feasible), but that’s just me. Bedbugs sometimes attend those flea markets, of course…

BERKELEY — On Tuesday, July 27, the PBS POV documentary series will air “Presumed Guilty”,a riveting examination of the Mexican judicial system created by UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy doctoral candidates Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete. In the Bay Area, the film will air at 10:30 p.m. on KQED.

Hernández and Negrete, both attorneys, document their struggle to free a wrongfully imprisoned man and to expose a Mexican criminal justice system that imprisons thousands of other innocent people like him.

PBS says this about the documentary: “Imagine being picked up off the street, told you have committed a murder you know nothing about and then finding yourself sentenced to 20 years in jail. In December 2005 this happened to Tono Zuniga in Mexico Cityand, like thousands of other innocent people, he was wrongfully imprisoned. ‘Presumed Guilty’ is the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Zuniga. With no background in film, Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete set about recording the injustices they were witnessing, enlisting acclaimed director Geoffrey Smith (“The English Surgeon”) to tell this dramatic story.”

Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Coronation BallFriday, February 26, 2010San Francisco Hilton & Towers
333 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco
(415) 982-3000
6:00 pm No Host Cocktails
7:00 pm Dinner and Dancing until midnight
Tickets: $120
The newly selected Miss Chinatown USA and her court will be crowned at the annual Harrah’s Coronation Ball. The black tie dinner/dance, attended by many community leaders, promises to be a highlight of the Lunar New Year festivities.

Here we go, straight out of the shipyards of Trieste, Italy, it’s Cunard’s Motor Ship Queen Victoria! Well, guess what – she’s coming to San Francisco on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, so plan accordingly.

Cunard Line’s youngest ship, Queen Victoria, will make her maiden call to San Francisco on Jan. 27, 2010, marking her only U.S. inaugural call in the next year.

Queen Victoria will stop in San Francisco as part of the first segment of her third world voyage. Expected to pass under the Golden Gate Bridge at approximately 6 a.m., she will dock at Pier 35 at 6:30 a.m. before departing at 6 p.m. for Hawaii. Designed in the grand Cunard tradition, the 2,000-passenger Queen Victoriais the second largest Cunarder ever built, weighing in at 90,000 gross tons and measuring 964.5 feet from stem to stern – more than 110 feet longer than San Francisco’s tallest building, the Transamerica Pyramid.

Thousands of spectators lined the shores of San Francisco Bay in 2007 when Cunard’s flagship, Queen Mary 2, made her first call in San Francisco. Best viewing locations include the Golden Gate Bridge – vista points on both north and south sides of the span; Fort Mason; Crissy Field and the Fisherman’s Wharf area. For information visit www.cunard.com.

This was the result: a string of slow-moving vehicles for as far as you could see, all the way to the Ferry Building. Click to expand:

Note the new signs. The previous versions talked about how “private vehicles” were banned from continuing. The current versions allow “buses, taxis, trucks, and bikes” on Market. So that makes things more clear for the tourists.

Speaking of whom, Our Visitors just ignore the signs. They understand that they need to keep out of the bus and taxi-only diamond lanes, but they don’t seem to get the idea that they’re not allowed to proceed on Market the way they used to. It seems they need a crew of MUNI Parking Control Officers to tell them what’s up.

Oh well.

(Myself, I got doored by one of these cars a couple minutes after I snapped this photo. I was on the slow lane of the beige portion of the street to the right of the vehicle when the passenger door opened – it was an against-the-rule dooring just like the Incident at the Juicy Couture.